Algae forms the life-supporting foundation of the natural food chain by providing the essential vitamins, minerals, proteins, and nutrients required to support life. The health benefits of some algae have long been appreciated when used as a dietary supplement for promoting and sustaining human health.
Phycocyanin, an accessory pigment to chlorophyll, is a pigment protein (phycobiliprotein) having characteristic light blue color and is mainly found in cyanobacteria. Phycocyanin has a wide range of applications such as, fluorescent markers, antioxidants, Immuno-modulant in pathological conditions, neuroprotective and hepatoprotective, natural pigments in food and cosmetics and the like.
Conventional methods for isolating phycocyanin from algae/cyanobacteria involve suspending dried, fresh or frozen blue-green algae in an aqueous solution to produce a cell suspension; disrupting the integrity of the algal/cyanobacterial cells, thereby releasing cytoplasmic contents, to produce a disrupted cell suspension; separating solid and liquid phases of the disrupted cell suspension; contacting the liquid phase of the disrupted cell suspension with a non-ionic polyaromatic macroreticular adsorbent resin; collecting the liquid phase from the resin to produce a phycocyanin extract; and optionally dehydrating the phycocyanin extract. The process may further involve contacting the extract with bed of silica gel/aluminum oxide/activated charcoal.
Some processes involve separation and purification of phycocyanin including precipitation, centrifugation, dialysis and chromatography process, these methods are difficult to carry out and are also expensive, and the resulting purity is not of the desired range/volume.
Though various process for the extraction of phycocyanin are known, the extraction rate is not high, resulting in an increased production costs and also the processes are tedious and time consuming.
It is therefore, desired to provide a simple and economic process which can be an alternative to the known process and which can also overcome the drawbacks associated with the known process such as complex process steps, time consuming, less yielding and un-economic, to obtain a biomass, that is substantially free from phycocyanin which can be used further for conversion to crude bio-oil.